Archives of Opposition: Ibāḍī Historical Writing in Post-Imamate North Africa

My project centered upon the production of historical narratives by medieval Ibāḍī Muslim actors. Despite the extant critical literature on Ibāḍī origins and theology (particularly political theology), the dimension of historiography has remained somewhat a lacuna in contemporary scholarly study. My intention was to explore this arena, with specific reference to the manners in which medieval Ibāḍī actors appropriated their past to navigate the concerns of their time. I was particularly curious about the heroes and villains in medieval Ibāḍī literature, and what these literary presentations had to say about claims about medieval Ibāḍī identity and ethics. To this end, I traveled to the National Library of the Kingdom of Morocco in Rabat, and found primary sources and secondary literature on the Ibāḍī Rustamid imamate (AD 767—909) which controlled parts of modern Algeria, Libya, Morocco, and Mauritania. The primary source I found most useful for my project was the Kitāb al-siyar of Aḥmad al-Shammākhī, a sixteenth-century Ibāḍī scholar patronized by the Ḥafṣid court. The Kitāb al-siyar was concerned first and foremost with the lives of Ibāḍī scholars of the medieval past. Among the biographies presented in the Kitāb al-siyar were revolutionary leaders, reigning Ibāḍī imāms, and regional governors. Many of these biographies read akin to self-contained epics, concerned mostly with famous deeds, praiseworthy acts, and miracles.

In the course of my research, I found that I had to find some way to handle the circumstances of production for the narratives I had found. Since my primary source was written several centuries after the events it recorded, I spent some time researching the biography of the writer to see if there were any clues as to why he was composing this work. I found that the writer, Shammākhī, was himself an Amazigh Ibāḍī scholar who had compiled his book from primarily Amazigh/Tamazight sources. Furthermore, the figures he portrayed in the Kitāb al-siyar were largely Imazighen, not Arab. The court he was patronized by, while ostensibly Sunnī, was also dominated by Imazighen. While the work itself was composed in Arabic, there were certain unfamiliar variations in the text (i.e. tanīn in place of ithnayn, the latter being a more standard way of saying ‘two’). While I did not find enough biographical information to present Shammākhī’s own stated motivations for producing the Kitāb al-siyar, these and other textual/contextual details hint at possible answers.

On the whole, my research is aimed toward challenging contemporary narratives in the study of Islam which privilege the ideological narrative of Sunnism as the dominant source for critical inquiry, at the expense of other narratives held to be somehow more ideological. To do this, it is necessary to portray the ways by which medieval Muslim actors wrote themselves into their histories in the same way as Sunnī sectarians. The example of Aḥmad al-Shammākhī and his Kitāb al-siyar not only helps complicate the sectarian milieu, but in many ways, brings into question just how reliable contemporary notions of sectarianism even are when dealing with medieval contexts.